In a data processing system, data may be received or transmitted via an input/output (I/O) interface. This may be an I/O controller interface to an off-chip data resource or a network interface controller (NIC) to a resource of a local or remote network.
When data is received from an I/O interface it is directed to a storage resource of the data processing system. Selection of which storage is to be used may be controlled by software or hardware configuration of the data processing system. However, this approach is not optimal since the usage of the received data is difficult to predict. As a result, data directed to a memory device may need to be moved at once to a processor cache for use, resulting in additional memory transfers, while data stored directly in a cache, via a cache stashing mechanism for example, may not be needed, wasting cache space and requiring additional memory transfers to evict the data back to memory.